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How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

simonwillison.net

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Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#81

Post by xrd »

I have kids and I'm really bothered by MrBeast. I had to buy goddamn chocolate bars at Walmart because of him. I acknowledge he is creative and driven but the content is such crap, with a few exceptions that my kids point out.

But, what's the alternative?

For example, I love 3brown1blue videos. But, it is too advanced even for my eleven year old.

Mark Rober videos are great, and my kids love them, but he's even inside MrBeast's orbit. And, he's not putting out as much content.

What are the good channels that create creative and stimulating videos that are a benefit to humanity.

Does YouTube kill those channels?

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#82

Post by tshaddox »

zulban wrote: post #54
hypeatei wrote: post #6

So basically: Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube) The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine Y…

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person. I don't like coffee…

Sure, there are different ways to be commercially successful and most probably require immense talent and hard work. Doesn’t really contradict any particular value judgment of the type of content he produces though.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#83

Post by throw10920 »

renewiltord wrote: post #7

On one side, an army of HN commenters: “Repeat after me. Don’t build on someone else’s platform.” On the other side, Mr Beast: > Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE…

Is this supposed to be a gotcha of some kind? I don't see any point or value in this comment.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#85

Post by mattnewton »

serjester wrote: post #62
hypeatei wrote: post #6

So basically: Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube) The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine Y…

Can you do better? If 100's of millions of people are watching something, then clearly it has entertainment value. His management philosophy might rub people the wrong way but it's hard to dispute it's effectiveness. Nor do you have to work there. His success is all the more impressive given he started with nothing and how competitive the space is. On some level he's the personification of the youtube algorithm - don…

Not saying Mr. beast content isn’t valuable to millions of people, but I think “It makes money so it must be valuable” is a terrible benchmark.

It’s also the case that people can succeed in spite of their management philosophies. If you only look at the people who have made it you miss out on all the people who tried similar approaches and did not, which is needed to figure out the effectiveness of a strategy before adopting it. Classic example are people trying to be like Steve Jobs who are not successful.

And on the value side - There are a lot of exploitive ways to hook people, and you can think something is exploitive / a local minima, without being an elitist.

Mr. Beast specifically seems fine to me in a similar way that porn is fine. I don’t think it crosses over to exploitive, but I don’t think it’s crazy to make that argument and I don’t think people are primarily motivated by sour grapes or jealousy.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#86

Post by Zanni »

llamaimperative wrote: post #59
Zanni wrote: post #40

Surprising reference to The Goal [1], which Mr. Beast "used to make everyone read ..." and still recommends. The Goal is a business novel about optimizing manufacturing processes for throughput and responsiveness rather than "efficiency" and is filled with counter-intuitive insights. Presenting it as a novel means you get to see characters grapple with these insights and fail to commit before truly understanding them…

Theory of Constraints is fascinating because, as MrBeast points out here, it seems extremely obvious. I've had numerous interactions on this site where a person dismisses an insight from ToC as "obvious" and then 2 sentences later promulgates the exact type of intuition that ToC disproves.

Yeah, this is the brilliance of the novel format. Someone presents an insight, and it can see obvious in isolation but then seems obviously wrong in context. "Of course we should favor throughput over efficiency" is obvious until you realize it means, for example, allowing idle time on incredibly expensive machines to favor responsiveness, which just seems wasteful.

In the novel, you get to see the characters bang their heads against these "paradoxes" again and again until it sinks in.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#87

Post by np_tedious »

abeyer wrote: post #76
zulban wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person. I don't like coffee…

Maybe... but I read it more as (and tend to agree with) blow it off because it's explicitly an approach that makes the world a worse place in almost every way except perhaps your bank account balance. It's possible to be successful without being mercilessly amoral and there's a big difference between not personally caring for a product vs thinking a product is toxic and holding your nose anyway for the sake of a payc…

If you really think that, then you should be all the more interested in what it means to execute on that allegedly-harmful effort well vs poorly

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#88

Post by debacle »

zulban wrote: post #54
hypeatei wrote: post #6

So basically: Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube) The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine Y…

The guy has earned a net worth of maybe $700 million starting with YouTube. Saying it's all a bunch of contrived bullshit hides the fact the he is obviously brilliantly talented and dedicated at making a business from YouTube. If you or others blow off a document he wrote or an interview he gives because most of his videos are "just" gaming an algorithm then you must not be a very curious person. I don't like coffee…

His interviews are just another part of his business, and evidence shows that much of what he says during them is not factual.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#89

Post by nicomeemes »

refulgentis wrote: post #74
bgun wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface. And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to pro…

YouTube Shorts is really dark, there's stuff that makes David Foster Wallace's 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical. There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking. Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators…

Well, at the very least Black Mirror will have plenty of ideas for next season.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#90

Post by nolok »

Unbefleckt wrote: post #75
hnpolicestate wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever see Dhar Mann brainrot videos? I don't see it going anywhere. It's a big reason why films aren't good anymore. Content producers cater to the intellectual tastes of their respective societies. Long story short, we get what we deserve. Long live Criterion Collection for the handful of us who abstain from mass produced trash.

I do get a sense of relief downloading a movie recommendation and being greeted by the Criterion logo.

I certainly hope the irony of this exchange isn't lost on the both of you, the mass produced Criterion products being seen as the saviors against the wave of mass produced products.
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